http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
The supposedly taciturn Jim Jeffords made the most of his notoriety last
week, warning Bush that he'd be a one-term president if he didn't heed
more "moderates" such as...well, himself. Not surprisingly, Bush didn't
fire his political strategist Karl Rove in favor of Jeffords, but
listened to the Senator (no doubt trying to keep his temper in check) in
what was described as an "awkward" meeting. I'll bet. It must've been
like when an employer pink-slips a bad hire and has to stomach an
analysis of everything's that wrong with the company as an
exit-interview is being prepared by the accounting office.

What, was Bush supposed to make Jeffords a happy Ben & Jerry's
legislator? He'd already allowed the Democrats to gut his education
proposal-an excessive, and mistaken, example of compromise-by allotting
more spending on lousy teachers than was warranted, as well as
jettisoning the crucial school voucher provision. As for the tax cut,
should Bush have handed over his legislation to Jeffords and said, "Hey
Jimbo, you're a man of principle, why not just white-out all the items
you think might offend your friends like John Kerry, Dick Gephardt and
Barney Frank?"

I doubt Jeffords, after his brush with media sainthood, is capable of
embarrassment, but too bad Fouad Ajami's excellent "Washington Diarist"
piece in the June 4 New Republic wasn't on newsstands when the Senator
made his decision to cast his lot with the likes of Maxine Waters and
Jesse Jackson. Ajami deftly mocked President Clinton's largely fruitless
trips abroad-which increased in frequency postimpeachment as he
attempted to tot up an accomplishment or two for legacy purposes-and
predicted that Bush wouldn't follow that self-aggrandized and
promiscuous use of Air Force One.

He wrote: "There is nothing of this in Bush. The man's ease with
himself is, in part, an ease with home and country and familiar
verities... Those who predict that, with time, President Bush will take
to the road and succumb to foreign temptation are wrong. A different
wind blows, with a different judgment about the world beyond the water's
edge. Consider this passage in the president's big speech in early May
calling for national missile defense: 'Like Saddam Hussein, some of
today's tyrants are gripped by an implacable hatred of the United States
of America. They hate our friends. They hate our values. They hate
democracy and freedom and individual liberty. Many care little for the
lives of their own people.'"

Those are the words of a "radical" president?

NEWSWEAK, AGAIN
Newsweek, in the throes of a demoralizing advertising recession,
attempted, in its June 4 issue, to shore up its Vermont subscription
base. Its "Conventional Wisdom" column, which may as well be written
each week by Hillary Clinton, was an ugly portent of the content farther
back in the magazine. Following are assessments of politicians in its
"Special Switcheroo Edition":

Cheney: "Buck-raking at VP mansion. What was your problem with those
Clinton 'coffees' again?"

I'll grant that the Veep's fundraiser last week, given the three-volume
catalog of Clinton/Gore improprieties during the 90s, wasn't a highlight
of this administration's first months in office. As for the rest, it
reeks of Jonathan Alter (who strikes me as one of the models for Jeffrey
Frank's puerile The Columnist); and sure enough, the Beltway insider
who's prone to bragging in print about his access to power, provides his
own slant on the Jeffords decision, a sappy piece called "The Odyssey of
Jeezum Jim." It's explained on page 4 of the issue that Alter, in the
early 80s, played on a softball team with Jeffords, and by golly,
sometimes after a game the then-Congressman would honor young reporters
like Jon and join them for cheeseburgers at a DC "dive." That's Jimmy
Appleseed for you, an egalitarian from head to toe.

Alter

Alter's profile is long and sickening, so I'll spare readers a complete
critique-although his slur on Calvin Coolidge was typical-and simply get
to the guts of his argument.

He writes, with one true sentence: "Like everything else in hype-addled
America, the political ramifications have been overstated. 'Not everyone
gets to wake up one morning and decide an inner voice has told him to
overturn the results of a national election, an unprecedented legal
struggle and a decisive Supreme Court decision to form a government,'
The Wall Street Journal editorial page opined, as if the unassuming
Vermonter were a craven usurper.

"Another way to view it is that Jeffords is restoring the true message
sent by the evenly divided electorate last November, which is that the
parties must share power. For the past four months George W. Bush has
been acting as if he had won a Ronald Reagan-style landslide, a shrewd
political strategy, perhaps, but out of sync with the actual election
returns. Last week's midcourse mandate correction comes early in Bush's
presidency, but late in the key policy struggle that will shape the
future: the 11-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut headed for approval may well
prevent the Democratic Senate from boosting spending beyond the margins
for years to come. Even so, the days of the Bush's catering exclusively
to conservatives are apparently over. Every part of his agenda will now
be subject to compromise."

These two paragraphs are riddled with so many fallacies it's difficult
to fathom that Alter is considered by the incestuous Beltway crowd to be
a "player," but this is the left-wing (or West Wing) Washington bubble
we're talking about.

However. Yes, the electorate was evenly divided (with Gore receiving
more actual votes) but Americans who cast ballots weren't in favor of
the parties sharing power. If you supported Bush, it was his
conservative agenda that was endorsed; a Gore vote, likewise, was for
the Democratic candidate's faux-populism and a continuation of Bill
Clinton's policies. As for "mandates," I'm sure Alter remembers that in
1992 Clinton received 43 percent of the popular vote, which certainly,
if you follow his reasoning, wasn't a mass appeal for the socialistic
healthcare legislation that the new President and his wife engineered.
Bush won the election.

Yet despite that fact, suck-ups like Alter
believe that his slender Electoral College majority (which the pundit,
on Nov. 8, advocated on MSNBC be ignored in favor of Gore's popular-vote
victory) dictates a division of power, with Bush eschewing his
conservative platform to accommodate the liberal ideology he vigorously
campaigned against. As for "catering exclusively to conservatives,"
despite the rhetoric from the media, that's simply not true, unless you
consider Bush's cabinet appointments Colin Powell, Christie Whitman,
Norm Minetta and Rod Paige to be political blood-brothers of Tom DeLay.

Powell

And yes, Alter is correct that Bush will have to compromise with a
Democratic Senate, just as he has these past four months. Much as I
approve of the spirit of the President's tax cut-a slightly
more-than-symbolic victory in that it changed the conversation about
wasteful congressional squandering of taxpayers' money-it was a
back-loaded bill, with no capital gains relief, and failed to reduce the
top income bracket to a level that would really stimulate the economy in
favor of the $300 and $600 checks that'll be sent out beginning this
summer. I was surprised that the repeal of the death tax wasn't gutted,
but that, too, won't be eliminated for 10 years, postponing the axing of
one of the IRS's most penurious methods of unfairly larding the
government's coffers with money to waste on unproductive programs.

Daschle, meanwhile, is being portrayed as an amiable but shrewd,
aw-shucks kind of guy. Sure. That's why on Meet the Press last Sunday,
the incoming majority leader called Bush's plans to drill for oil in
Alaska "finished." As in, end of conversation, George. Also, as Greg
Pierce reported in Monday's Washington Times, Daschle has no fear of New
Jersey Sen. Bob Torricelli facing an indictment later this summer. When
Tim Russert (on the same edition of Meet the Press) asked Daschle about
a front-page story that morning in the New York Post, which was
headlined "Torch Is Toast," the South Dakotan said, "I'd say consider
the source." Perhaps Daschle's been so busy courting Jeffords this
spring that he wasn't aware that The New York Times originated the press
investigation of Torricelli and has been relentless in its coverage of
the gift-taking Democrat.

Finally, Geoffrey Norman, sportswriter for National Review Online,
summed up how the Silent Majority might feel about Jeffords. He wrote on
May 26: "Jeffords (who is my senator in the sense that I am from Vermont
and so is he) had been doing his political transvestite act for so long
that nobody even noticed any longer. The only way for him to make news
was to finally get the operation. Vermont is the most insignificant
state in the Union. Wyoming may have fewer people but it has a lot more
oil, coal, cattle, and other useful things. Vermont no doubt led the
world in macrame production in the 70s. Now it refines maple syrup and
governs itself like the last 60s
commune."

JWR contributor "Mugger" -- aka Russ Smith -- is the editor-in-chief and CEO of New York Press (www.nypress.com). Send your comments to him by clicking here.